This was where I came to understand the power and burden of my sexuality – and I revisited the place in all three of my books

I ricocheted across Britain from the fishing working class of Aberdeen where I was born. Up and down the country we went, taking in mining villages in Northumbria, Canterbury, North Lanarkshire and finally Norfolk, by the time I was 15. My childhood involved more than nine primary schools (I eventually lost count), five secondary schools and more council houses, B&Bs and private slum flats than anyone’s should. The woman I am is the sum of all the challenges, kindnesses and observed tenacity from those less written-about streets, as much as it is the product of my adventures in an adulthood spent nomadically in Hanoi, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Budapest. But Great Yarmouth is the town that made me and broke me in equal measure.

The name will conjure up the smell of hot, sugared doughnuts, the adrenalin fizz of cascading 2ps in neon-lit arcades